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Media Investment

Social media continues to drive engagement with TV, film and the ads that support the media industry. Sensing an opportunity, TVTY has launched the Social Trend Trigger, aimed at making it easier for brands to tap into the socialverse at opportune moments, just when things are starting to trend.

Essentially, the goal is to allow marketers to keep up with the nanosecond-long attention span of the average millennial, by instantly launching digital advertising campaigns based on real-time social trends. Using pre-set triggers, brands can instantly launch digital campaigns across platforms like Facebook and Google, to, the company says, “connect to their key audiences in the moments that matter most to them.”

For instance, a film company or TV channel could trigger advertising campaigns whenever associated actors are trending on social media – even if this is unexpected. Alternatively, marketers can trigger advertising whenever a brand ambassador is prominent, consolidating the brand association and improving ROI. Other triggers that brands have seen success with include TV shows or adverts, sporting events and changes in the weather.

Whenever these pre-determined keywords or phrases are trending on Facebook or Twitter, the company will be automatically alerted — no manual monitoring here — and given the option to launch a hyper-targeted campaign.

For brand safety, marketers can put controls in place that restrict campaigns launching if the trending content relates to sex, violence or anything else that could be damaging to the brand.

“Marketers always want to capitalise on viral moments, but until now even the fastest ad campaigns risked missing the peak moments of fan interest,” said Antoine de Kermel, EMEA MD at TVTY. “Using the Social Trend Trigger, marketers can ensure they never miss these opportunities.”

More broadly, the launch fits in nicely with ongoing programmatic (algorithm-determined) advertising trends, which is on the rise as marketers seek to break down the silos between platforms. The utopian vision for advertisers is the ability to capture ‘liquid audiences’ as they move from touchpoint to touchpoint; they may say that they want X amount of social engagement, X amount of engagement on desktop, and X amount on mobile — or they may want to reach custom audiences, such as female Premier League fans that that are SUV buyers and also socially engaged with cat videos. Call it a ‘frankensegment’ approach.

At first, programmatic marketing was often used to reach target audiences as cheaply as possible, with little regard for the quality of the sites in which the ads appeared. It is now being used in conjunction with valuable data segments to target individuals in intelligent and creative ways, identifying those most likely to be receptive to a brand’s messages and encouraging them along the path to purchase, often in premium environments. Within this vision, the Social Trigger fills in an important blank.

“Programmatic buying of digital media has become the norm in major markets, and is aggressively following this path in smaller markets,” said Benoit Cacheux, global head of digital & innovation at Zenith Research, which expects programmatic to grow 31% to account for 58% of expenditure in 2017. The market was worth $39 billion last year. “We believe that the growth of programmatic will continue to be fuelled by improvements in the quality of media available in programmatic environments – especially private market places – and the greater availability of programmatic mobile media, as well as the sophistication provided by ad tech solutions such as data management platforms and connected ad tech stacks.”